25 March 2011

Three years of aguanomics

Wow. Three years, 3,200 blog posts and 280,000 visits by 160,000 unique visitors.

The Zetland Arms, London (photo by Suncica)

It's no exaggeration to say that this blog simultaneously dominates my life and gives me great rewards and satisfaction. As an economist interested in debating, understanding and promoting good policies, I cannot imagine a better vehicle than a blog and a better community than the one at aguanomics.

Seriously, this is no echo-chamber of ditto-heads. I've really benefited from your participation, comments, questions and patience.

Whenever I do one of these updates (the last one was at 30 months), I provide quantitative and qualitative information on the blog.

Numbers

In a comparison [PDF] of March 2010 to March 2011 to the year-earlier period, a few things stand out. First, the number of visits and page views are down (!) by 15--18%. These numbers do not reflect RSS readers, but that count has been over 1,100 for quite some time. 94,000 visits and 145,000 page views (250 and 400 per day, respectively) is certainly not bad, but who wants less? (Interestingly, the number of views to the home page are down by 25%, which implies that more people are reading posts in the archive.)

On the upside, visits from the Netherlands are up by 295%! (Oh wait, that's me.)

On a slightly geeky note, the share of visitors using Chrome is up from 5 to 13 percent.

Turning to Technorati, aguanomics has an "authority" of 482, putting it at 3,135th place in the world (Stats for "green" are 510 authority and 110th place, respectively). Given that last place is 105,767th, that's not bad :)

Thoughts

The blog is a lot of work, and it's rewarding. I've used it to think about and find new ideas for research. Most of the material in my book (update on THAT project coming soon) first appeared here. I've gotten some consulting, many talks, and endless questions from people who know more about the blog than any other aspect of my work.

At the moment, the blog has "nothing" to do with my day job, but I often post things here that I discover while doing my research. It's also nice as a means of "just do it" analysis and publication. I've ranted about useless academics and publications many times in the past, and this blog has kept me from exclusively occupying that category.

I plan to continue blogging. My inbox and notes are full of new topics and thoughts, so there's no immediate risk of a posting drought (joke!). On the other hand, I continue to monitor Plan B (quit everything, bake bread, travel). It's nice to have an alternative to desperation, but the increase in my influence, effectiveness and interest appears to be outpacing my ennui and disillusion with the same crap in newspapers or political pronouncements. Life is process, and this one ain't half-bad.

Bottom Line: Aguanomics is healthy, interesting to me, and (hopefully) useful to you. If you want to make someone's day (and mine), then recommend aguanomics to your friends, family, colleagues and hangers on. That's right -- click here.

One reason your home page hit numbers are down may be due to the requirement that the individual (such as me) who wants to read the comments, or wants to comment, must activate cookies on that individual's computer. I don't want to and I suspect others feel the same way. Consequently, I work around that requirement (for reading comments) by reading them in the archives, something I stumbled on as a solution.

Congratulations! Loving the blog as always. I have learned a great deal from it over the years and it has certainly taught me a lot about the economics of water; more importantly about why institutions and governance are critical to any good water management. I look forward to many more great posts in the future.

Wow, it's been a while. I'm glad to have commented here in your blog's early months (example thread). I've found another place to keep Bob Murphy careful on environmental issues since then, but I do like your work. Keep it up!